


The War Within

by shealynn88



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, PTSD, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-01
Updated: 2013-09-01
Packaged: 2017-12-25 07:35:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/950418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shealynn88/pseuds/shealynn88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sherlock asks him to come away from the comfort of tea and biscuits and therapists and a cane.  Asks him back to war with a look in his eyes that says he's there already, waiting.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The War Within

The world is tremulous and shimmers like a mirage outside his window. Inside, the war goes on, clamoring inside his head and dividing him, absolutely, from what the rest of the world calls normal.

There's nothing that can possibly be 'normal' for him anymore.

Months later, he's still raw inside. Always raw, always broken somehow. They think the limp is the worst of it, or the divot inside his shoulder blade, jagged and messy with bone callouses. 

But they're wrong. It's not the visible scars that keep him up at night, or put a perpetual crease between his eyebrows. No. It's those growing bits inside his skull that do that. The ones that look perfect to every instrument, but that he knows are irreparably wrong. Those small cancers of _different_ , seeded by the war and growing, slowly, in it's absence.

 

He contemplates his gun sometimes. Picks it up and turns it over. Remembers the feel of it in his hand, the grim way he would hold it steady and squeeze the trigger. Like target practice.

And they'd drop.

Only four of them. He remembered each one in detail; could replay each one in his mind's eye whenever he wanted to. Sometimes, when he didn't.

It's not fear that keeps him from turning it on the wrongness in his head and the life that seems like a pale shadow. Some of it is Harry. He doesn't like her, exactly, but he doesn't want to leave her alone.

Some of it is a ghost of an idea that there must be something. Something more than sitting like this, day after day, staring at empty pages, loaded guns, and a cane he hates with a passion so dark it would frighten a normal man.

But he's not normal anymore, is he? And he thinks...maybe there's a place out there, somewhere, where the jagged pieces of what's left of him fit into something larger. Maybe there's a jagged hole out there just waiting for him.

 

Sherlock is distant. Brilliant. Different in a way that is just as invisible, just as concrete and impossibly huge as the war inside that sets John apart.

He's sharp and dismissive, too, and that should be what makes John shy away. But the sharpness cuts, just the tiniest bit, through the mirage that stands between John and anything real. And being dismissed or ignored doesn't really matter when John doesn't really feel like he's there at all, anyway.

 

His world opens, suddenly, when he's needed. When Sherlock asks him to come away from the comfort of tea and biscuits and therapists and a cane. Asks him back to war with a look in his eyes that says he's there already, waiting.

And suddenly the jagged pieces of him fit into the sharp, sharp edges of Sherlock's disdain and the underlying loneliness that John only recognizes because it's in him, too. And they're friends, of a sort. Nothing that anyone else seems to understand, but that doesn't really matter. 

 

It means something to be here. To be at war is to be alive, and John takes slow, ponderous steps into the fray. It means giving up the illusion that he could fit somewhere else.

Somewhere normal.

It means embracing a reality that is full of darkness, and truth, and Sherlock. 

A reality where John finally fits, broken against sharp, where he, with Sherlock, is something approaching whole.


End file.
